I want to run a Duplicati backup from my Ubuntu laptop to my Ubuntu media server. It seems difficult, which makes me think I am missing something, because Dupicati otherwise looks very smooth and easy (thank you).

I have created a folder on the media server and shared it. On my laptop, I can see the folder and read/write with it. It shows as smb://mediaserver/backups.

In the browser GUI for Duplicati, I’m not sure if I should set as the “Storage Type” that it is a local file/folder or use something like SSH. If I select local, then nothing shows up as the share on the server, but if I select SSH, then it doesn’t seem easy to put the smb:// address in.

I’m sure it must be a straightforward task to do this local backup over my LAN. It was certainly easy to make a backup to an attached USB hard drive. After this, my next task is to backup to Amazon S3. But I’m a bit stuck at this LAN backup. Can anyone help? Thanks.

Thanks for the clarity. I don’t think I can do a ‘Map’ in Ubuntu, like is possible in Windows. And I want to keep as far away from Windows as possible, after it has started blue-screening on me. Ubuntu seems much more stable.

I think the SFTP route is better. Do you have any recommended resources for an idtiots guide on how to do that?

The Linux equivalent of a Windows “map” is a drive mount, which you should definitely be able to do in Ubuntu.

I don’t have experience setting up an SFTP server in Ubuntu but I’m sure somebody else here does (perhaps @Pectojin?). Be sure to let us know when you get your setup working and maybe we can set up to #howto guide for SFTP on Linux similar to the one we’ve got for Windows.